When God Doesn't "Answer" Your Prayer...

Have you ever been disappointed by God? You prayed for something and God didn’t answer your prayer? It was a noble prayer, a good prayer—for healing, for direction, for help. You had it all figured out. If God answered your prayer, you would live happily ever after, and God would get all the glory.

But the answer never came, and you felt confused and frustrated. You wondered, “Does God really answer prayer?”

Yes, He does, but God always answers prayer in a way that gives Him the most glory and us the most benefit. Even if we don’t see it at the time.

Sometimes, we’re so certain God should answer a prayer a certain way, when He does provide the answer unexpectedly, we don’t even see it because we’re looking elsewhere.

If God doesn’t answer our prayer by changing a circumstance, we need to know He has a purpose for it.  When my daughter went blind nearly ten years ago, I thought the only possible answer to my prayer would be a miraculous healing. But that answer never came. Instead, God used Amberle’s disability and her passion for marginalized people groups to create The Banquet Network, a non-profit organization that helped dozens of churches develop thriving disability ministries. He chose to use the circumstance for an eternal purpose rather than a temporary one.

Philippians 4: 6-7 exhorts believers to “pray about everything.” And we should. That includes praying about circumstances, but it also includes praying past them—for how God might use the hard situations in our lives to make us more like Him. To learn to trust Him day by day.

When it looks like your prayer isn’t answered, remember, God doesn’t allow one thing to happen to that He can’t use for His glory and our benefit as long as we cooperate. If God brings you to it, He’ll bring you through it. If your prayer isn’t being answered today, perhaps God has more than an answer for you. Perhaps he has Himself.

Now, it’s your turn to “hang out naked.” . What circumstance are you praying for? How can you pray past that circumstance for something more?

Hope Is a Choice

The last few weeks have been tough. On all of us. Looking at the news and the atrocities in the world, it would be easy to lose hope.

But we must not.

Hope is critical to life. In fact, it’s been scientifically proven!

Back in the 1950’s, Curt Richter, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, performed a study now known as the “Drowning Rats” experiment. Richter placed several dozen rats in a bucket of water. They all drowned after only a few minutes. He repeated the experiment with another group of rats, but this time, right before the rats drowned, he picked them out of the water for a moment, dried them off, and then put them back in. The result? The rats that were momentarily rescued swam approximately 240 times longer than those who were not. The reason, Richter hypothesized, was that the second group of rats had hope.

Hmmm. If having hope can make that much difference in the life of a rat, imagine what it can do for us!

According to the Oxford English Dictionary hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” It’s not some wishy-washy, pie-in the sky, unsubstantiated longing. Hope is a logical decision, usually based on some sort of possibility. In other words, hope is a choice. Your choice.

I find that really interesting, especially in light of 1 Corinthians 13.

This celebrated chapter closes with the well-known words, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13 NIV). 

Faith, hope, and love—three great virtues of the Christian life.

Think about those words for a moment and what each one means for the believer. Love is a command (John 13:34). Faith is a fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). But hope is a choice.

Do you ever have problems choosing hope? I’ve had challenges, but what ultimately got me through was the idea that I could either continue in the circumstance with hope or without hope. The choice I made wasn’t necessarily going to change the situation, but it could change me. I couldn’t control the circumstance, but I could control my response. So, I chose hope. What about you? What is it that threatens your hope and how do you make the choice to stay in hope? Share your words of wisdom.